Although we had no physical contact with anyone except the other seven people living inside, parts of our lives were very public. Often groups of visitors would gather to watch us through the glass windows that separated our two worlds. Being caught in undignified positions no longer bothered us. Being without self-consciousness allowed us to work barefoot in shorts, even in the most amusing circumstances, such as splashing through the rice paddies splattered with mud while diving for the tilapia that grew there. We couldn’t hear what people said through the glass unless our ears were pressed against it and they were shouting. Sometimes people held up signs wishing us good luck, and it gave us a boost to see their smiles and thumbs-up gestures. At times when someone wanted total privacy, it wasn’t difficult to find seclusion deep within the vegetation of the rainforest, far from the side glass, or to do chores early in the morning or in the evening when visitors weren’t around.
At 10:45, a break was announced over the radio. Mint tea and roasted peanuts were set out in the plaza. For fifteen minutes, we relaxed on the carpet and cushioned benches, or on the first steps of the tower stairway, then dispersed to go on to the next of our biospherian tasks.
This was Gaie’s day to put on her wetsuit and scuba gear to ‘garden’ the coral reef: a weekly dive that included examining the overall health of the reef and fish populations, cleaning the underwater viewing windows, and removing excess algae (similar to weeding). An on-site security guard would regularly watch her through the window, acting as her diving buddy, as we were too few to have her accompanied each time. If anything went wrong, the guard would call Laser to join Gaie underwater.
While Gaie checked the coral reef, Sally moved the day’s vegetables and a week’s supply of staples (grains, tubers, and fruit) into the back kitchen to be weighed, logged into notebooks, and stored in refrigerators, grain bins, or the freezer. Then Gaie and Jane returned to the agriculture area to examine the crops for insects and disease. Sally had recently released two new types of mite predators, so she also collected a few sweet potato leaves to check on how they were doing. A microscope sat on a counter in the laundry room off the plaza for these examinations. Jane sprayed the rice paddies and grain fields with B.T. (Bacillus thurigensis), a useful bacterium which parasitizes looper worms, a harmful caterpillar, from a five-gallon backpack sprayer. This method had successfully kept the loopers under control.
By then Linda and Taber, into their second hour of wilderness operations, moved to the upper savannah to prune back the passion vines and cowpeas that were giving too much shade to the African acacia trees along the savannah stream. In the sand dune area of the desert, Mark took soil cores to measure soil moisture. On the dune sat a squat Plexiglas box nicknamed ‘R2D2’ (after the Star Wars robot), a device which continuously measured the CO2 (carbon dioxide) coming out of the soil. We moved the machine from biome to biome, to monitor how CO2 efflux changed with the seasons. The desert had its last rain a few weeks prior, and the soil had rapidly dried out, with CO2 emissions having dropped considerably. Mark took samples from the first and second foot of soil and weighed them wet before drying them in the agricultural drying ovens. In seven days, he would have to weigh them again to get accurate soil moisture readings.
Laser continued his round of preventive maintenance, which included cleaning filters in the water systems. He called the Energy Center to check on the status of repair of their backup generator and on our supply of chilled water. The higher the outside temperature, the colder the water had to be in order to cool down the Biosphere.
We had already cut the dry grasses in the dormant savannah in anticipation of the first rainfall to bring it out of dormancy. The timing of these seasonal climate changes were determined by the SBV research division which then required coordination between the Biosphere 2 crew and personnel in Mission Control to program the air handlers. Between our morning break and lunch, Roy re-calibrated sensors for atmospheric temperature and humidity.
At 11:30 Sally started a phone call with school children in Ohio. Seated in their school library, some sixty eighth graders listened on speaker as Sally talked about Biosphere 2 and then answered their questions. Hundreds of schools around the country have used educational materials from Biosphere 2 to learn about biomes and global ecology. Many grade-school students have designed and even constructed their own model Biospheres complete with plants and even insects. All eight of us frequently connected with schools in Arizona and around the country–one of the most enjoyable of our “jobs” while inside. When Biosphere 2 was first planned, it was not expected that it would be more than a quiet research endeavor in the somewhat remote, and seasonally quite hot, Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona. We expected to recoup the investment by building other biospheric laboratories in world cities which would double as eco-tourism destinations. But when Biosphere 2 struck a nerve and excited people around the world, people began coming–by the dozens, hundreds, then thousands, even before we had created a formal visitor’s program. Consequently, we realized that biospherics education had to be an important part of Biosphere 2’s program; and reaching and changing minds, especially young minds, was a major payback for the epic creation of the facility.
By noon, Gaie showered, changed, and returned to the kitchen to make final preparations for lunch. Like most of the Biosphere 2 cooks, she’d done much of the work the previous afternoon while fixing dinner. With the vegetables cut and the potatoes already baked, she only needed to finish the salad. She made a dressing (bananas blended with water and chopped herbs), popped her baked potato casserole into the oven to reheat, and salted the soup of beans, vegetables, and chicken broth which had been slowly cooking in a crock pot since the night before. She then sautéed Swiss chard and beet greens in the wok and mixed up another cold salad of sliced beets and papaya.
Jane and Sally were giving the goats and chickens their midday feed. The buck, Buffalo Bill, received a diet lower in protein than the milk goats and had to be locked into a side pen during each of the three daily feedings. The two kids normally kept Buffalo Bill company, but since they were now a week into being weaned, they also were fed a different diet in a separate pen. Buffalo Bill was a veritable Houdini at opening pen doors, so before leaving, Jane routinely double-locked them and tied them with a loop of baling wire.
Lunch time was 12:30. A couple of latecomers had let us know via radio that they’d be along soon, and we prepared plates for them. All our meals were either served on individual plates or put out in servers where it’s easy to see each one-eighth portion. Everything was eaten, a tribute both to the care with which the cooks prepared the meals, and to the appetite we brought to each meal.
Over lunch, we’d share more news. We were all especially interested in animal sightings in the wilderness, news from TV radio, or email, or what comes over the grapevine from friends or staff with whom we had recently been in touch with by phone. Jane brought up the coming arts festival we had planned and who on the outside would be sending in their music, paintings, or poems over the video system. Laser enthusiastically described his encounter with a baby galago in the orchard the previous night; Linda said it was a baby newly born to Topaz. One of our buddies in Mission Control took on the weekly task of renting the latest video releases for us. Laser announced that Lorenzo’s Oil and Malcolm X had just been piped in and we all let out a hearty cheer. ‘Piping in’ a movie means that Laser would place a blank tape into the VCR to record what had been transmitted through the video link with Mission Control.
For an hour and a half after lunch, we usually took an informal siesta. After the initial months of adjusting to the new diet, the heavy physical work, and the lower oxygen supply, not many of us actually used the time to take a nap, but instead relaxed in our rooms reading or phoning friends. It became a welcome break in the workday. Everyone in Mission Control knew our schedules, so there were no radio calls during that time, unless there was something urgent to attend to. This day Mark’s family came to visit him at the special window we use to meet with outsiders. His mother, who after closure, made the big move from Brooklyn to Tucson, his brother, and his sister-in-law, who lived just a few miles away, chatted with him at the window through a speaker phone.
Around 2:30, Sally would place